BBC Question Time Panellist Mehdi Hasan Calls Non-Muslims Animals

On Question Time tonight, the BBC invited as a member of the programme's esteemed panel Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of the left-wing The New Statesman and now political director at the leftist website The Huffington Post, regular contributor to The Guardian, in short one of the mainstream Islam's public figures that the UK elites and media are so keen on.

If you want to know a bit more about his views and see how much of a moderate Muslim he is, watch the video above in which he is caught comparing non-Muslims to "animals": so he is speciesist as well as Islamic supremacist.

Hasan is also in support of Iran's nuclear program.

The BBC's invitation of the leader of the BNP Nick Griffin to Question Time, which provoked so many protests, not only pales in comparison but also Griffin, despite the constant attacks he receives, has done nothing to deserve them.

If people want to continue calling Griffin and his party "racist" and "fascist", they have to support these accusations with real evidence, not demagoguery.

Obama Totalitarian Socialism's Early Signs

I knew that Obama was bad news even before he was elected President.

Four years ago, in 2008, during his first presidential campaign, my blog Of Human and Non-Human Animals was shut down by Blogger.

Not knowing why, I made several searches on Google until I found out that the same thing had recently happened to many other blogs. All these blogs had in common was that they had in any way been critical of Obama.

In a forum I found a very clear and detailed explanation of how the Obama campaign volunteers, many of whom "young, inexperienced, with little knowledge of the Internet" and, I would add, not particularly smart, had gone around the web looking for any minimal sign of dissent with their political star and tried to damage the sites containing these "heresies".

If the site was a Blogger blog, like mine, they flagged it to Blogger.

So I remembered that on this blog of mine, which was all about animal issues - its tagline is "Why giving animals a fair deal is good for humans too" -, I had posted an article entitled Candidates on Animal Rights.

In it I compared the policies of Obama and John McCain on animal issues, and found both of them seriously wanting.

I cannot know for sure, but all the available evidence, including the fact that my blog, like many others which had suffered the same fate, was then reinstated, points to my blog having been shut down for that reason.

This incident to me seemed a shocking display of censorship and curtail of free speech, especially in view of the fact that I hadn't even singled out Obama in my criticism, but had been even-handed with both of the then presidential candidates.

It immediately gave me a sense of bad things to come from Barack Hussein if elected as President of the USA, and this prediction turned out to be accurate.

Incidentally, when it comes to Obama there is always a double standard.

I remember four years ago he was treated by the media as a champion of the animal cause just because he had promised his kids a dog if elected to the White House.

Romney made an excellent joke last night, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to benefit needy children, when he said:

I've already seen early reports from tonight's dinner. Headline: Obama embraced by Catholics, Romney dines with rich people.

Wake Up, Animal Rights People!

To see that the animal movement has left the initiative of fighting against the huge spread of halal meat in Britain to the BNP, who organized a protest in Sunderland against Subway sandwich shops selling it (and there many of them all over the country) is shocking and saddening.

I wrote in Islam in the UK, in my site Britain Gallery:

When I first arrived here, the word “halal” was unknown to everybody except the people involved in animal welfare, who knew that the Islamic method of slaughter was bad news indeed for the animals. Now you only have to take a 30-minute drive around London (any part) and you’ll see dozens of Halal signs in shops and restaurants.

It's true that animals should not be killed for food, as vegetarian nutrition is not only adequate but in fact much better for human health than meat eating. It's true that animals always suffer during the process of farming - especially industrial farming -, transport to the point of slaughter, and in the slaughterhouse due to terror and maltreatment. It's true that even so-called "humane" slaughter can sometimes go wrong and animals may be conscious when their throats are cut or they are otherwise killed.

But we can point out all these things and still be opposed to halal and kosher methods of slaughter.

Stunning animals before slaughter is certainly better than not doing that, whatever else is true about farm animals exploitation and suffering.

Sweden has banned ritual methods of slaughter, so this shows that it is a realistic objective in the UK as well.

To find out what ritual slaughter involves, read this post and watch the video.

There is a growing opposition to halal meat among the British people, based on both animal welfare and the just rebellion against being disposessed of the culture and ethics of one's own country.

We should be at the forefront of this protest, which can ony be good for animals because, among other things, will provide a model example of a widespread protest for animal welfare popular among the general public.

This is only one of many ways in which Islam is an obstacle to animal liberation and animal welfare. In the Netherlands, when Muslim politician Hasan Küçük, a Turkish-Dutch representative on The Hague city council for the Islam Democrats, called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, Holland's third-largest city, because dogs are "unclean" in the Islamic legal tradition, it was left to Paul ter Linden, representative of Geert Wilders' PVV on the city council, to reply: "In this country pet ownership is legal. Whoever disagrees with this should move to another country." The Dutch Party for the Animals, whose proposal to make The Hague a dog-friendlier city had prompted Küçük's call for banning dogs, was silent.

Since the number of Muslims in the UK and Europe is doubling faster than you can say "Ramadan", there will be many more times in the future when we'll face this choice: are we going to give in each time? In the long battle ahead are we going to choose political correctness or the animals?